Until 2008, the
ReutersReuters news agency formed part of an independent
company,
Reuters Group plc , which was also a provider of financial
market data. Since the acquisition of
Reuters Group by the Thomson
CorporationCorporation in 2008, the
ReutersReuters news agency has been a part of
Thomson Reuters, making up the media division.
ReutersReuters transmits news
in English , French , Arabic , Spanish , German , Italian , Portuguese
, Russian , Japanese , Korean , Urdu , and Chinese . It was
established in 1851.

The Reuter agency was established in 1851 by Paul Julius Reuter in
Britain at the
LondonLondon Royal Exchange .
Paul Reuter worked at a
book-publishing firm in
BerlinBerlin and was involved in distributing
radical pamphlets at the beginning of the Revolutions in 1848 . These
publications brought much attention to Reuter, who in 1850 developed a
prototype news service in
AachenAachen using homing pigeons and electric
telegraphy from 1851 on in order to transmit messages between Brussels
and Aachen.

Upon moving to England, he founded Reuter's Telegram Company in 1851.
Headquartered in London, the company initially covered commercial
news, serving banks, brokerage houses, and business firms. The first
newspaper client to subscribe was the
LondonLondonMorning Advertiser in
1858. Afterwards more newspapers signed up, with Britannica
Encyclopedia writing that "the value of
ReutersReuters to newspapers lay not
only in the financial news it provided but in its ability to be the
first to report on stories of international importance." Reuter's
agency built a reputation in Europe and the rest of the world as the
first to report news scoops from abroad.
ReutersReuters was the first to
report
Abraham LincolnAbraham Lincoln 's assassination in Europe, for instance, in
1865. In 1872,
ReutersReuters expanded into the far east, followed by South
AmericaAmerica in 1874. Both expansions were made possible by advances in
overland telegraphs and undersea cables. In 1883,
ReutersReuters began
transmitting messages electrically to
LondonLondon newspapers.

1900S

In 1923,
ReutersReuters began using radio to transmit news internationally,
a pioneering act. In 1925,
The Press Association (PA) of Great
Britain acquired a majority interest in Reuters, and full owners some
years later. During the world wars,
The GuardianThe Guardian reported that
ReutersReuters "came under pressure from the British government to serve
national interests. In 1941
ReutersReuters deflected the pressure by
restructuring itself as a private company." The new owners formed the
ReutersReuters Trust. In 1941, the PA sold half of
ReutersReuters to the Newspaper
Proprieters' Association, and co-ownership was expanded in 1947 to
associations that represented daily newspapers in
New ZealandNew Zealand and
AustraliaAustralia . The
ReutersReuters Trust Principles were put in place to
maintain the company's independence. At that point,
ReutersReuters had
become "one of the world's major news agencies, supplying both text
and images to newspapers, other news agencies, and radio and
television broadcasters." Also at that point, it directly or through
national news agencies provided service "to most countries, reaching
virtually all the world's leading newspapers and many thousands of
smaller ones," according to Brittanica.

In 1961,
ReutersReuters scooped news of the erection of the
BerlinBerlin Wall .
Becoming one of the first news agencies to transmit financial data
over oceans via computers in the 1960s, in 1973
ReutersReuters "began making
computer-terminal displays of foreign-exchange rates available to
clients." In 1981,
ReutersReuters began making electronic transactions on
its computer network, and afterwards developed a number of electronic
brokerage and trading services.
ReutersReuters was floated as a public
company in 1984, when
ReutersReuters Trust was listed on the stock exchanges
such as the
LondonLondon Stock Exchange (LSE) and
NASDAQNASDAQ . Reuters
published the first story of the
BerlinBerlin Wall being breached in 1989.

The
ReutersReuters News Agency employs some 2,500 journalists and 600
photojournalists in about 200 locations worldwide.
ReutersReuters journalists
use the
ReutersReuters Handbook of Journalism as a guide for fair
presentation and disclosure of relevant interests, to maintain the
values of integrity and freedom upon which their reputation for
reliability, accuracy, speed and exclusivity relies.

The first
ReutersReuters journalist to be taken hostage in action was
Anthony Grey . Detained by the Chinese government while covering
China's
Cultural RevolutionCultural Revolution in
PekingPeking in the late 1960s, it was said
to be in response to the jailing of several Chinese journalists by the
colonial British government of
Hong KongHong Kong . He was considered to be
the first political hostage of the modern age and was released after
being imprisoned for 27 months from 1967 to 1969. Awarded an OBE by
the British Government after his release, he went on to become a
best-selling historical novelist.

In May 2016 the Ukrainian website
Myrotvorets published the names and
personal data of 4,508 journalists, including
ReutersReuters reporters, and
other media staff from all over the world, who were accredited by the
self-proclaimed authorities in the separatist -controlled regions of
eastern
UkraineUkraine .

ReutersReuters has a policy of taking a "value-neutral approach," which
extends to not using the word "terrorist" in its stories, a practice
which has attracted criticism following the
September 11 attacksSeptember 11 attacks .
Reuters' editorial policy states: "We are committed to reporting the
facts and in all situations avoid the use of emotive terms. The only
exception is when we are quoting someone directly or in indirect
speech." (The
Associated PressAssociated Press , by contrast, does use the term
"terrorist" in reference to non-governmental organizations who carry
out attacks on civilian populations. )

Following the 11 September attacks,
ReutersReuters global head of news
Stephen Jukes reiterated the policy in an internal memo and later
explained to media columnist
Howard Kurtz (who criticized the policy):
"We all know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom
fighter, and that
ReutersReuters upholds the principle that we do not use the
word terrorist...We're trying to treat everyone on a level playing
field, however tragic it's been and however awful and cataclysmic for
the American people and people around the world. We're there to tell
the story. We're not there to evaluate the moral case."

In early October 2001, CEO
Tom GlocerTom Glocer and editor-in-chief Geert
Linnebank and Jukes later released a statement acknowledging that
Jukes' memo "had caused deep offence among members of our staff, our
readers, and the public at large" and wrote: "Our policy is to avoid
the use of emotional terms and not make value judgments concerning the
facts we attempt to report accurately and fairly. We apologize for the
insensitive manner in which we characterized this policy and extend
our sympathy to all those who have been affected by these tragic
events."

In September 2004,
The New York TimesThe New York Times reported that
ReutersReuters global
managing editor, David A. Schlesinger objected to Canadian newspapers'
editing of
ReutersReuters articles to insert the word terrorist. Schlesinger
said: "my goal is to protect our reporters and protect our editorial
integrity."

CLIMATE CHANGE REPORTING

In July 2013, David Fogarty, former
ReutersReuters climate change
correspondent in Asia, resigned after a career of almost 20 years with
the company and wrote about a "climate of fear" which resulted in
"progressively, getting any climate change-themed story published got
harder" following comments from then deputy editor-in-chief Paul
Ingrassia that he was a "climate change sceptic ". In his comments,
Fogarty stated that "Some desk editors happily subbed and pushed the
button. Others agonised and asked a million questions. Debate on some
story ideas generated endless bureaucracy by editors frightened to
take a decision, reflecting a different type of climate within
Reuters—the climate of fear," and that "by mid-October, I was
informed that climate change just wasn't a big story for the present.
…Very soon after that conversation I was told my climate change role
was abolished." Ingrassia, currently Reuters' managing editor,
formerly worked for
The Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones for 31
years.
ReutersReuters responded to Fogarty's piece by stating that "Reuters
has a number of staff dedicated to covering this story, including a
team of specialist reporters at Point Carbon and a columnist. There
has been no change in our editorial policy."

Subsequently, climate blogger Joe Romm cited a
ReutersReuters article on
climate as employing "false balance ", and quoted Dr. Stefan
Rahmstorf, Co-Chair of Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute
that "imply, a lot of unrelated climate skeptics nonsense has been
added to this
ReutersReuters piece. In the words of the late Steve Schneider,
this is like adding some nonsense from the
Flat Earth Society to a
report about the latest generation of telecommunication satellites. It
is absurd." Romm opined that "We can't know for certain who insisted
on cramming this absurd and non-germane 'climate sceptics nonsense'
into the piece, but we have a strong clue. If it had been part of the
reporter's original reporting, you would have expected direct quotes
from actual skeptics, because that is journalism 101. The fact that
the blather was all inserted without attribution suggests it was added
at the insistence of an editor."

In 2010,
ReutersReuters was criticised again by
Haaretz for "anti-Israeli"
bias when it cropped the edges of photos, removing commandos' knives
held by activists and a naval commando's blood from photographs taken
aboard the Mavi Marmara during the
Gaza flotilla raid , a raid that
left nine Turkish activists dead. It has been alleged that in two
separate photographs, knives held by the activists were cropped out of
the versions of the pictures published by Reuters.
ReutersReuters said it is
standard operating procedure to crop photos at the margins, and
replaced the cropped images with the original ones after it was
brought to the agency's attention.

ACCUSATIONS OF PRO-FERNANDO HENRIQUE CARDOSO BIAS

In March 2015, the Brazilian affiliate of
ReutersReuters released a text
containing an interview with Brazilian ex-president Fernando Henrique
Cardoso about the ongoing Petrobrás scandal . One of the paragraphs
mentioned a comment by a former Petrobrás manager, in which he
suggests corruption in that company may date back to Cardoso's
presidency. Attached to it, there was a comment between parenthesis:
"Podemos tirar se achar melhor" ("we can take it out if think it's
better"), which is now absent from the current version of the text.
The agency later issued a text in which they confirm the mistake,
explaining it was a question by one of the Brazilian editors to the
journalist who wrote the original text in English, and that it was not
supposed to be published.

*
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